Some people have been taking interest in the annotation engine, a collaborative annotation project I've been working on sporadically. (Thanks
rsp and lkcl.)

Interesting, I also just got spam from Third
Voice about the latest version of their still-IE-only browser plugin. (I won't sell my soul for that...) Annotator
predates Third Voice for public
commentary on web pages hosted elsewhere, and itself owes a lot to the CritLink
mediator. It's server based, so much more portable than Third Voice -- once you've navigated the frames, it
even looks decent in lynx. Right now, however, it's very slow, mostly at the stage of very inefficient
pattern-matching to place notes in the text. It's just a set of Perl scripts talking to a mySQL database if
anyone wants to poke around :-).

Ultimately, I'd want to use tools like this in the Openlaw
project
for collaborative development and editing of documents. Mailing lists have their limits. Law firms must be among
the most technologically backward places, so I can claim this to have some sort of relevance to what I'm
supposed to be spending my time doing.

So, I'm as bad at keeping an electronic diary as I ever was at keeping one on dead trees. Still reeling under the
oppressive weight of Judge Kaplan's
decision against 2600 in the NY DVD case, as well as a huge amount of ordinary work (legal research and
drafting in other areas).

After the EFF
and MPAA briefs pass as ships in the night to
Judge Kaplan's chambers, we wait to see whom he gives what grounds for appeal...and how soon. Time,
perhaps,
for a mid-term assessment of the Openlaw strategy (or more likely, for more law-firm-associate hacking at briefs
and research
questions).

(so, how does the trust metric deal with certifications on different scales -- I'm here more on the strength of my
legal work, supporting open source/free sofware through work with the Berkman Center and its Openlaw project, than my unsightly Perl programming, I'm sure -- can I certify others based on their
participation in the DeCSS defense?)

(and why do these textboxes keep eating my quotation marks?)

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser
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markup better than the original parser.